Categories

I have been loving the Glory of Losers rendition of the Gundams. They had created enhanced versions of the first versions of the Gundams, such as the Heavyarms Igel, and Sandrock Armadillo, with practical but slightly over-the-top additions. I’ve done the Igel since I loved it so much, and it was the first kit I’ve gotten from Model Legend. I had a hard time ordering his kits since the resellers were often charging ridiculous amounts, but I find ordering direct from China quite risky if not complicated.

Model Legend has resin conversions for Igel, Armadillo (first and second versions, reviewed in this youtube video), deathscythe hell’s claws and alton’s new backpack. I got them all by using Taobao’s foreign shipping service, where they purchase locally to a warehouse and ship overseas afterwards. The transaction went through, but one thing that wasn’t nice is the warehouse does not notify you when the local purchase arrived. The goods will sit in the warehouse until you go discover them :-/ I waited for a month and noted that the items were already in the warehouse 2 days after I bought them, huge bummer! There were also some strange errors when I tried to ship the items, but after messing with it a bit they finally arrived. Shipping via EMS (express international) from China was surprisingly cheap, about $13USD for all of these kits in a smallish box. I’m mostly excited by the Altron’s conversion (198RMB or ~30 USD), which I’ll review in this post.

There were quite a few complicated options with this kit. Model Legend not only did the backpack, but also had conversion kit for Shenlong to Nataku EW in a separate kit, as well as a redone extension mechanism for the Dragon Fangs which are those two giant claws. I’m very interested in the latter because there were no way to do cool poses with what the original kit provided. Model Legend lets you buy lengths of extensions, which consists of the extension bits in resin, as well as a piece of thick red wire used to connect them, each length of 25cm is 50RMB or ~8USD. I got 2 lengths.

Earlier this year I thought I’d never be able to get this kit so I went ahead and bought another one that I liked less. If anyone wants it email me 🙂 The nice thing about Model Legend’s is that its wings are bigger, more complicated and workable, whereas the one I’m not using may be closer to the manga’s design but seems a bit small. Here is the instruction sheet. Like most resin kits you mostly guess what’s going on, the main complication for this kit is it said in red “choose your own mechanism for joints”. The “flapping” movements of the wings have some holes for you to do something with them, but it wasn’t complete so you really need to add your own joints.

I did not get his Nataku conversion kit, but in this backpack kit he still included pieces for the feet and the ankle armor. There are also 4 pieces for the calf which I couldn’t find any difference with the original. The additional ankle and feet are nice, but having already built the Nataku I didn’t find them enhancing the kit too much so I opted out, but perhaps I’ll revisit. The ankle armor have some fitting problems, but as you can see from my dry fitting the wings were fitting very well.

There is also the Nataku from Super Nova which I also have. It looks impressive, but it is more like a reimaging of Nataku rather, with details quite different from the EW version. The things I’m not completely sure about the Super Nova version is the Dragon Fang’s extension is done through some ball joints which looks … like ball joints 🙂 Whereas Model Legend’s look more like how the EW anime had it. Moreover the Super Nova version has the Fangs attached to the backpack rather than the arms, which makes attaching the new backpack some amount of work. Perhaps one day I’ll mod the Super Nova and add my other Altron backpack?